Texas Hospice Owner Allegedly Urged Nurses To Overdose Patients

The director of Novus Health Care Service allegedly told nurses to “overdose hospice patients with palliative medications such as morphine to hasten death.”

The phrase “there is no hope for humanity” has never been so apt.

A hospice in Frisco, Texas, is under fire after a local news channel obtained an FBI affidavit highlighting some disturbing practices at the medical care center.

As NBC 5 reports, Texas native Brad Harris, the owner of Novus Health Care Services, regularly ordered staff to overdose hospice patients with drugs like morphine to hasten their deaths and maximize his own profits.

The 34-year-old, who reportedly has no medical training and is actually an accountant, sent his nurse a text saying, “You need to make this patient go bye-bye,” according to an FBI agent. The nurse resigned instead of following the order.

Harris opened the healthcare company in 2012 and the intelligence agency has been investigating him since 2014. Shockingly, no charges have been filed against Harris, who on once told a nurse to overdose three patients and directed another employee to increase a patient’s medication to four times the maximum allowed.

“If a patient was on hospice care for too long, Harris would direct the patient be moved back to home health, irrespective of whether the patient needed continued hospice care,” an employee told the FBI.

The warrant also highlights that Harris wanted to “find patients who would die within 24 hours” and even recruited patients “who did not qualify for services” to bill the government.

While the entire situation seems borderline psychopathic, the hospice owner’s actions were purely monetary. There is an “aggregator cap” on such medical care services, which limits Medicare and Medicaid payments based on the yearly average hospice stay. In short, if a patient lives too long, the provider is forced to pay back part of their payments to the government.

“Hence, hospice providers have an incentive to enroll patients whose hospice stays will be short relative to the cap,” the agent wrote in the affidavit.